A data center may be defined as a physical location, for example, a room that houses one or more components, such as computer systems, that are capable of generating heat. The computer systems may be arranged in a number of racks. These racks are configured to house a number of computer systems which typically include a number of printed circuit boards (PCBs), mass storage devices, power supplies, processors, micro-controllers, and semi-conductor devices, that dissipate relatively significant amounts of heat during their operation.
Increases in system-level compaction of data centers have resulted in increases of server-level and rack-level power densities and dissipations that place significant pressure on traditional data center thermal management systems. Conventional data center thermal management involves traditional systems that use computer room air conditioning (CRAC) units to pressurize a raised floor plenum of a data center with cool air that is passed to equipment racks via ventilation tiles distributed throughout the raised floor. Temperature is typically monitored and controlled based on a single sensory feedback signal, which acts as a global indication of the heat being dissipated in the data center, at the hot air return of the CRAC units away from the equipment racks. This conventional mode of operation allows no local flexibility in how the cooling is delivered to the servers or computers in the data center, and there is no local state feedback information from different areas of the data center. Consequently, due primarily to a lack of distributed environmental sensing, traditional thermal management systems often operate conservatively with reduced computational density, added operational expense, and unnecessary redundancy due to poor utilization.